Posts filed under 'review'
I am pretty excited about my new Canon Powershot S5 IS. Since it is so new and there are few reviews of it around I thought I should post my “review.” If you skipped the S3 waiting for a big improvement like I did, this might be what you have waited for. But it is still not a huge improvement. If you have an S3, it might not be worth it at least till the price drops a bunch.
Major updates since I originally posted are in blue. Last updated November 24.
I was very happy with my Canon Powershot S2 IS and it still works fine (except for some grinding noises sometimes). So I was having trouble deciding whether to get the S5 or not and a lot of the early information about it was killing my excitement for it. I had been looking at alternatives in case I decided not to get the S5, but I didn’t see any that really stood out. And after finally getting to look at some of the other SLR-like cameras in person I decided just to go for the S5. There is always eBay or the 15% restocking fee if I just can’t stand it.
You can see a growing number of samples of my shots with the S5 here. Hopefully they can help you make your own decision on image quality.
The S5 is available now at Best Buy where I over paid for mine. I normally would only buy a camera online since you can find it cheaper, usually pay no tax, and likely get free shipping. But I was impatient this time and I had a gift card I was tired of carrying around.
Circuit City’s website has the camera with an unadvertised low price ($25.00 off). I don’t know how long that price is good or if it will be good in store. But the camera isn’t available yet in the store anyway and the employee I talked to said it isn’t in the computer yet and usually things show up in there about a week before they get them. Best Buy seems to have got an exclusive release date. I called Circuit City and asked about the camera, they said they are shipping them now if you order online, but he didn’t know when they would be available in stores. Checking again on June 23 on their website, Circuit City now says it is available in stores and that lower price is still listed.
Image quality seems to be a slight improvement over the S2. It may be a tiny bit softer, but not by much (if any) and more small detail is visible. You can see noise reduction effects sometimes when “pixel peeping,” but for regular viewing and printing it isn’t an issue. The noise reduction isn’t horrible and I have seen much worse samples from other cameras. Without moving up to an SLR, you aren’t really going to improve much no matter what. The sensor size and lens of the S5 are the same as the S2 but the megapixels keep going up since most people believe megapixels are everything. Canon had to increase it or it wouldn’t sell, and they seem to have done a decent job getting a bit more detail from this small sensor. I took a set of images comparing noise at different ISOs between the cameras. In those well lit indoor shots, the S5 always appear a little better. Outdoor shots are harder to determine. I have seen a small bit of purple fringing in a few of my outdoor max zoom shots especially around overexposed areas but not enough that it bothers me. Indoor zoom shots, even not so well lit, show the same minor improvement over the S2.
The feel is good, though I don’t like the minor changes with button placement. They moved the customizable button to the left side of the camera where it is basically useless. If the LCD panel is out, getting to the button with your left hand is not convenient. Since they moved that button they moved all the others down. The buttons are slightly less easily pressed compared to the S2. I guess that could be a good thing or a bad thing. You are less likely to accidentally press a button, but you will have to get used to pressing harder.
Color saturation is a bit better than my S2. Low light focusing appears slightly better but still can be trouble. Focusing in regular light on even a moving target seems improved. The view finder is brighter (and bigger too I think) though the resolution still isn’t great. And the larger LCD screen is brighter and amazing. I can’t believe I have been happy with the S2’s panel before now that I have used this giant.
ISO 400 seems ok. Some people will claim it is still unusable. Others will say it’s decent. Going higher than ISO 200 is still something to avoid if possible but I would rather have a noisy image than a blurry one or none at all. Noise reduction software can do an amazing job even on ISO 1600 images.
I really like the hot shoe for using an external flash even though I probably won’t use it that often. I have an old 1980’s Canon flash that isn’t able to talk to the camera so I had to set things manually on the camera and flash, but it is nice to have a very powerful flash. There is an annoying delay between hitting the shutter and the flash firing though. If you are shooting a fast moving target, you have to track it or won’t be in the shot by the time the flash fires. Before you use an old flash you should read this and check this chart, certain old flashes have very high trigger voltage which will over time burn out your hot shoe.
The old flash stopped working with my camera after a few months (it’s connector was nearly broken when I started using it) and I liked having the extra flash power so I bought a Sunpak flash which should have worked fine, but for some reason didn’t so I exchanged it for a real Canon flash, the Speedlight 430EX. Much more expensive, but now that I have it I am glad I didn’t stick with a cheap flash. The refresh rate of the 430EX (until the batteries are low) keeps up with the speed of the camera’s continuous shooting mode (compared to several seconds between shots with the other). So far I use it mostly for macros which it is not well suited for (the 530EX is). But a home made diffuser/reflector helps a lot. So it turns out, I do use the hot shoe a lot. Since I got the new flash, I hardly shoot macros without it.
The S5 has several new features that I like in theory, Face Detection, Continuous Shooting AF, and Safety Manual Focus, but I will have to wait and see how useful they really are.
I have not yet tried Face Detection much but it sounds like it works well for other people. It is on by default for the more automatic modes, but it must be activated manually for P mode and higher. Unless you turn off FlexiZone, face detect is not very useful. Once detected, the auto focus box would stay on the position the face was when detected. If you turn off FlexiZone, Face Detect can be activated all the time with the set button and is just like in the automatic modes.
Continuous Shooting Auto Focus seemed to work ok but is not perfect. The speed isn’t too much lower than the regular continuous shooting. But there is no focus box to aim to help keep focus on your subject so some shots may be focusing on the subject and some on the background but it will be nicely in focus. It is not hidden away in a menu option so is easy to activate, it is right there as a choice next to regular continuous shooting when you hit the button.
Safety Manual Focus is a feature I think might be extremely useful. I have a Raynox DCR-250 macro adapter and at its maximum magnification, focusing is extremely difficult so manual focus is almost a must. But even then I miss a lot of shots just slightly due to the very narrow DOF so I hope safety focus help. I haven’t yet really put this feature to the test.
The lens cap does seem like it will stay on better than the S2, it is now a sort of clip on lens. But it still pops off so it doesn’t put any pressure on the lens motor if you forget to remove it. So it may still not stay on all the time, but I have not knocked it off accidentally yet.
The plastic tripod mount threads on the S2 have been replaced by metal. That was a common complaint with reviewers but I didn’t find it that bad. But now that it can have an external flash it does need the better thread.
There is now an ISO Speed field in the EXIF that Picasa and Flickr both read now so you don’t have to look in the Maker Notes fields to find it.
Canon got rid of the intervalometer and the high speed continuous shooting mode, but I suspect the majority of users never even knew either of those features existed. I will miss the high speed mode’s 2.4 fps. Regular continuous mode is the same as the S2 and S3’s 1.5 fps.
Actually comparing regular continuous shooting on the S2 with the S5, both cameras do seem about equal though not exactly the same. The S2 seemed to start off faster I think but over a minute slowed down slightly a few times in my first test. It was on an older smaller card but both were SanDisk. Neither had been formated recently and both had images already on them.
|
shots |
size |
time |
fps |
| S2 |
89 |
66 mb |
1 min |
1.483 |
| S5 |
91 |
102 mb |
1 min |
1.517 |
I did some further tests comparing the speed of the two cameras. The S5 is a tiny bit (one shot per minute) faster than the S2’s normal continuous shooting mode. I used the same memory card in both cameras this time and included low level formatting it as a test for each camera which made no difference. Having the LCD panel open or closed also made no difference. I set the cameras to manual on ISO 80 and the fastest shutter speed I could at F2.7, 1/1600s. I also tried shooting with the S5 in lower resolutions, which slows it down slightly because it must resize.
|
shots |
size |
time |
fps |
resolution |
| S2 |
92 |
40 mb |
1 min |
1.533 |
2592×1944 |
| S5 |
93 |
36 mb |
1 min |
1.554 |
3264×2448 |
| S5 |
89 |
22 mb |
1 min |
1.483 |
2592×1944 |
| S5 |
91 |
1.8 mb |
1 min |
1.517 |
640×480 |
In regular shooting there is a longer black out moment right after you hit the shutter. On the S2 it was so short I didn’t even realize it was there until now. The S5 seems to double the length of the blackout which is still extremely short and certainly not measurable by me, but seemed odd until I realized the S2 did it also.
The memory card slot is now under the battery door which is probably good for retail marketing since they can leave a card in there now and not have it stolen. That is good for trying the camera in the store which used to be difficult with no memory, but it is annoying for owners. I prefer to use a card reader so I take the memory card out frequently. Now I have to worry about not turning the camera over or I have to close the door so the batteries stay in. I found that if I left the door open on the S2 I was less likely to forget to put the memory back in. Going out to shoot with no memory card sucks. The door now opens different, instead of front to back like the S2, it opens to the side. And thanks to the extra strong springs on the batteries, closing the door is difficult. I wonder if I will download images less frequently to avoid using that door. Maybe it will improve with use as the springs get softer, but closing the door is my biggest complaint about the camera.
I have read some places that claim that the focusing on the background problem has been improved. If it is, its still far from gone. Just ask the blurry bird I shot tofday. The camera liked the leaves behind him better since they were lit better and higher contrast even though the bird took up more than 90% of the focus box on the screen. Five out of nine shots focused on the background or at least tried to. Some of those the whole shot was blurry but the leaves were less blurry. I finally had to go into Digital Zoom so there was very little background visible to get the shot. It doesn’t actually look too bad. Even with the S2, the background focusing problem was never a big issue. It is annoying when it happens, but it isn’t common and can usually be worked around by adjusting your angle or focusing on a nearby object.
Even though the flash is a tiny bit higher than the S2, it is still partially blocked by the lens when in Super Macro mode. But that can be easily overcome with a home made ring flash diffuser. It is made out of a Styrofoam bowl and called the CCRRFD. Once I learned about it, I have used it for most of my macros.
DCResource.com has up sample photos from the S5. He says the review probably won’t be up till July though. These aren’t completely controlled studio shots so it is difficult to compare them, but his S3 gallery has three very similar shots between the two cameras.
CNet has a review up. I prefer DCResource and DPReview’s more in depth reviews but since they aren’t out, you have to decide without them if you can’t wait.
DCRecource and DPReview posted their reviews. Here are a couple other informative reviews that have popped up recently: dpinterface.com, photoreview.com.au, mycanong7.com.
There is also a Flickr group for the camera and you can view photos taken with the S5 in Flickr’s Camera Finder. When I first posted, the group only had four photos and they were all mine. Now we are nearing 200 photos. In the group, I started a discussion of things that annoy users about the camera.
Overall I like the camera. It’s not perfect, but no camera is. I would recommend it. But I also recommend you find it online for less than $500. It isn’t hard if you can stand to not have it right away. If you aren’t already an S series user, you should look at the S3 too though. You can find it for about half the S5 price online. If the new S5 features don’t interest you, the S3 is a much better deal and there is likely less difference in image quality than there was from the S2. Don’t focus on the megapixels, six is plenty for most people.
I will keep this post updated as I learn more about the camera. I have had it for less than 24 hours so far so I am sure there is a lot more to learn. I bet reading the instruction book would help. I have now read some of it. It did help.
June 20th, 2007
In addition to my Canon S2 IS, I have been using the Canon PowerShot SD800 since October. Carrying around a pocket sized camera is so much more convenient. I never thought I would buy a camera with less than 6x zoom, the SD800 has 3.8x. It also starts at 28mm instead of the usual so it gives me a nice wide angle but means that 3.8x zoom gets even less up up close. Even though I give up the huge 12x zoom when using it, I don’t miss it too often. I usually know when I will need the good zoom. And in those cases I usually carry both cameras.
There are several reasons for still using this camera when I carry the S2. It is wider angle, can shoot in lower light, and seems to have better colors. The colors thing may be in my head, but I think for at least the wide angle shots the colors are much nicer out of this camera. Zoomed in you loose some of that and a bit more sharpness than I like.
Reading some user settings recommendations from similar SD models on Flickr, they say to turn AI Auto Focus option off. That is partially for speed but also gives you control over what is in focus. I turned it off because then it matches my S2 and I like choosing what I focus on. I turn multi point focus off in any camera I use including a couple of film SLRs. I rather focus in the center and reframe. That way I know what is in focus and don’t have to worry about the camera cycling through the focus points while I loose the shot. Maybe I just haven’t used the right camera, but so far I don’t like AI Auto Focus.
Compared to my Canon S2 IS this camera produces slightly softer images. But I think that is just due to the much smaller lens and squeezing an extra two megapixels out of the same size sensor. Looking at some other shots in the pool, it certainly isn’t only my camera. DCResource has a really thorough review and says, “Sharpness was where I prefer it: not too sharp, not too soft.” I would like it to be a bit sharper, but its not bad. I am very happy with this camera.
I shoot a lot of macros of bugs and anything else small I can find. Mostly I use the S2, but the SD800 does a good job too. It can’t get nearly as close as the S2’s super macro, but does produce nice macros from a few inches away.
I always thought I wouldn’t like such a small camera since working the controls and just holding it would be awkward with my long fingers. But that hasn’t been a problem at all. When I bought it, I had no idea I would like it so much.
Last week my SD800 took a dive onto a hard floor and didn’t survive. I got a Lens Error message and grinding noise when trying to turn the camera off and the lens is stuck in the extended position. So I sent it in for repair. It is still under warranty, but drops aren’t covered and they were able to tell from the internal damage to the lens that it was dropped so it is costing me $115 for non-warranty repair. Not bad since a new one would cost $300. Hopefully it will be back soon. I miss it.
May 13th, 2007
Microsoft recently released another public beta of Windows Vista so I downloaded it as soon as possible. I just got around to installing it. This isn’t the 64 bit version though like I got last time; I have read that was slow for a lot of people so maybe not releasing another public 64 bit beta yet of it was smart.
It does seem a good bit faster than the last build I tried. My system still rates a 1.0 on the Performance Score even though the average of the components is 3.22, but now there is an explanation why. The “Base Score” is “determined by lowest subscore.” That does make sense since a major bottle neck can slow down the system significantly. But in my case, all I loose is gaming graphics and Aero. For many users that would not be a big deal. Since the scoring system appears to start at 1, you would expect that system to totally suck. But Microsoft says, “a computer with a base score of 1 or 2 usually has sufficient performance to do most general computing tasks…” So how do users differentiate the really horrible systems from the not so bad ones?
I opened up IE (which again didn’t appear in the Quick Launch toolbar until first run) and clicked on an article on Homer Simpson on the opening MSN page. I was then presented with a Suspicious Website popup, saying the site might be a phishing website. Good to know their system works so well it tags their own site.
I have not seen the UAC dialog much, but that could be because I was setup with an Administrator account. I thought users were supposed to be Standard Users. Looks like MS wants there to be at least one admin on the system other than the built in account. That makes some sense, but is going to leave that one user more vulnerable that necessary.
I really miss the Up button in Explorer. I use that all the time. You can do basically the same thing using the URL bar, but not by simply hitting one button in a constant place. I often would traverse folders very fast using the Up button. I hardly ever use the back and forward buttons.
I really like the ability to type commands or program names into the Start Menu, it really makes finding programs easier and faster. That is a good thing because I hate the menu otherwise. It is not nearly as easy to use as the Classic Start Menu or even XP’s menu. I like that My was dropped from the System places, but now they are hard to find. I keep looking for My Computer or My Documents and they just aren’t there. Computer and Documents just don’t stand out.
I pressed the “shutdown” button in the start menu and of course, being Vista you aren’t supposed to actually power off your system. It attempted to go into suspend or hibernate (whatever the default is) and quickly popped out. I assumed it was because I wiggled the mouse as I let go, but when it came back my wireless mouse was no longer recognized so I doubt it. Using the keyboard I again hit the shutdown button. This time it seemed go half to sleep and would not wake back up. Good thing I wasn’t trying to put Windows to sleep.
September 3rd, 2006
The thought of a movie about snakes on a plane was just so stupid I was not going to see this movie. But I gave in Saturday. The reviews of the movie were not nearly as bad as I expected. It is frequently referred to as dumb B-movie summer fun. The idea just kept growing on me and when my friend called and asked what new movies are out I knew what we had to see.
It certainly is no award winner, but it is a very fun movie. The movie is a lot like an airplane hijacking movie except you can’t try to reason with snakes and you can’t shoot them all. Some of the advertising makes it seem like a horror movie, I don’t care for horror movies, but didn’t really see it as a horror movie. It is violent, gross, suspenseful, and sometimes scary, but if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be nearly as fun. Of course, if you suffer from Ophidiophobia you should skip this movie. Otherwise, if you need one last good summer movie, this is it.
No matter how stupid the idea is, “Snakes On A Plane” is such a good title that it has apparently become a new way of saying “shit happens” according to the Urban Dictionary. I doubt I will be using it, but at least I will know what it means if I ever come across it.
August 20th, 2006
I am not talking about when you accidentally erased your camera’s memory or it got damaged, there are already plenty of solutions for that. What I want is to fix photos that have somehow been corrupted. In my case, photos of my Grandmother’s 80th birthday were put on a bad CD (not by me). Not that many were damaged, but it has annoyed me for several years that I couldn’t recover them. Finally I thought I found the solution with PixRecovery.
Turns out it does little or nothing at least for my images. Looking into the files I can see why nothing could be fixed. The bad areas are mostly full of null characters from the bad CD read. At the time I copied them I attempted reading them in lots of different ways to recover anything possible. I did get several back or at least less damaged copies. I also ended up with a bunch more that showed damage so I presume the built in CD error correction was helping a lot. PixRecovery wasn’t able to do anything even with the less damaged files either, there was still a block of about 2000 nulls in a row even in the least damaged image. There just wasn’t anything to recover in those spots which throws off the whole rest of the image.
It is nice though that they provide a demo version so you can see if it works. I am sure for some people it must work. But since the full version costs $149.00 I am kind of glad it didn’t help. I only had a few bad images, but if it works for you and you have more than a few that need fixing, that is certainly worth the price if your photos are important.
Anyone know of any other solutions? Even realigning the blocks (and hopefully color) with a blank spot in the middle would be an improvement for these images.
August 19th, 2006
I downloaded the public Windows Vista Beta 2 and gave it a try on my year old Athlon 64 desktop. I thought finally I would get to use my CPU to its full potential. It should be pretty fast. It was not. I am sure it is partly due to a lot of debugging code still in the beta, but I was surprised.
So far I was not able to try out the Areo Glass interface but the default theme was pretty anyway. My video card rates a 1 on Windows’ System Performance Rating even though it is a Nvida GeForce4 MX 4000 I bought last summer. It doesn’t support something that the Areo interface needs so gets a 1. For 2D graphics, they give the card a 2.0. The rest of my components are 3.3 or above yet my overall system gets a 1. That really adds up. It seems that the max number is a 5.9, but as faster hardware is released, the max number will go up.
I am not the only one unhappy about low overall scores. Computer manufacturers don’t like the idea of customers seeing how bad their brand new $400 system rate. Integrated graphics and slow components are not going to rate well. And guess what $400 systems are made of.
It seems like everything in Windows is moved just for the sake of moving it. Things might be more discoverable through menus and related topics, but things are not easier to reach. Getting to Classic Control Panel is not as easy as it used to be either. And the User Account Controls thing does come up way too often for the most stupid reasons.
Does anyone want to guess where the Undo file operation option went or how about Folder Options? Remember there is no menu bar anymore in Explorer. I gave up and went to Control Panel to get to Folder Options. Eventually I discovered both were under the Organize button along with Copy, Cut and Paste. Who do those options have to do with organizing?
There is no more Display option in even Classic Control Panel, it and a bunch of other stuff now make up Personalization. I would never have found it had it not been for the icon being very similar to XP’s Display. Even right clicking on the Desktop gives you this Personalization menu. Under it though, the first option is to the regular Display panel.
There is still no Internet Explorer icon on the desktop (as in XP with the new style Start Menu) and until I first ran IE, it wasn’t in the Quick Launch area either. Yet, we still have the Recycle Bin at the top of the desktop. Which do you use more, the internet or the recycle bin?
You can still get the Classic Start Menu which as in XP, puts more icons on your desktop. Using it, I now get Computer (renamed My Computer), Control Panel (why on the desktop?), my name (this is the root of my user folder rather than My Documents which does not get a desktop icon), Network (renamed My Network Places), and finally the Internet Explorer icon. Now I have 8 icons on my desktop, taking up 80% of my vertical desktop space which is set at a tiny 1280×1024 resolution.
It would be nice if they could combine the classic style Start Menu with some of the search features of the new Start Menu. But is it really a start menu anymore if it doesn’t say start? In the default theme, it is just a Windows logo. How are we supposed to tell people click on the start button? What do we call it now? Windows logo button? If we are helping people out that need help finding the start menu, it is hard to predict whether they will even recognize the Windows logo.
I also found that when you shutdown from the Start Menu (which is identified only by a power off symbol) you go into sleep mode rather than power off. When I turn something off I like it off. Of course, it gets worse, the machine appears to try to power down to sleep level, but once it gets there, it instantly wakes up. And how can it get worse? My wireless mouse is not recognized when it wakes up. A popup balloon says a USB device is not recognized. Of course, pulling out the wireless receiver and reinserting it makes the mouse work fine again.
I then went hunting for the way to make that button really shut down my computer. It was a long hunt. I don’t remember where I eventually found it, but it was under a deeply buried button named advanced something. Shortly after that I realized, by clicking the side arrow next to the Shutdown and Logout buttons, I could choose from all the usual options. But still is sleep a good default choice? Hopefully that is not the default on laptops. You need to conserve all the power you can on a laptop.
I was also impressed to discover that by default you are running 32 bit Internet Explorer. I had read that the 32 bit version was left for compatibility with older plugins and maybe embedding but didn’t remember it was the default. Why should I have to specifically go hunting for the 64 bit one? If you start IE from the Quick Launch or where it is listed at the top of the the new Start Menu, you get the 32 bit version. And there is no sign of IE 64 bit unless you look under All Programs. Only under the Classic Start Menu is it easily visible right next to the 32 bit version. But what normal person is going to understand the difference? They both look the same.
Notepad had a major upgrade, it now has an optional status bar showing Line and Column numbers. Wow. You can’t get better than that. Well, I guess you could, but it would require a tiny bit of effort and then you would put out of business all the notepad replacement programs. We know how MS doesn’t ever want to put other companies out of business.
They got rid of my favorite mouse cursors, the animated hourglass ones. I hope they will come back with the final release.
I wanted to see what some files looked like in Vista so I went to my XP Documents and Settings folder. I don’t remember what it said, but I wasn’t allowed in at first. It offered to do something and stupidly I said ok. I have no idea what it was doing, but now I can access my XP documents. I worried it was screwing up my file permissions and I wouldn’t be able to log into that account in XP anymore. Turns out whatever was happening didn’t cause a problem that I have found yet. My username and password for both XP and Vista are the same so maybe that had something to do with not screwing everything up.
It took me about an hour to install it which wasn’t bad for taking up most of an entire DVD. I have really wanted to give it a try for a long time now so it was worth the wait. I knew there were going to be things I didn’t like in Vista. There usually are in new versions of Windows. But I didn’t think it was going to be this much. I no longer think I will be an early adopter when it is finally released. Eventually I will give in of course (since I can’t stand using Linux as a desktop system). It was pretty and fun to try but that is about it. I am sure the speed will be greatly improved by the time it is released, but that was the least of what annoyed me.
June 11th, 2006
My mom has been talking about wanting a camera and it was her birthday so I figured why not kill two birds with one stone. She gets a camera and I get to try out one of the new Canon models. I could easily have gone with a cheaper model, but I found a pretty good deal on the Canon A540 (six megapixels), $36 below average street price and free shipping. Most reviews say it is worth the extra cost over the very similar A530 (five megapixels).
It seems to me that the A540 shares at least some of the new hardware being used in the Canon SI S3 that I want. Reviews of the S3 have not been so great because it is basically the same as the S2. You get one more megapixel but they say ISO 400 is less sensitive than it used to be on the S2 (because now it is a more correct measure) and ISO 800 is basically unusable. After trying out the A540 I agree, 800 is basically unusable unless you really must have the picture and don’t care about the quality. And even then it doesn’t seem much better than the old S2’s 400 in the dark though that is with image stabilization so hard to compare directly.
Full reviews of the S3 are now up at dpreview.com and dcresource.com. Both have some pretty good comparisons photos from the S3 and the S2. While I still think it is a great camera, I have decided (for now) it is not worth upgrading from my S2. But if my S2 died, the S3 certainly would be on the top of my list.
Back to the A540, other than ISO 800 being so noisy most people will never use it and the long flash refresh time, it is a nice little camera. I would prefer a bit more zoom, but you know I am addicted to my 12x. For most people 4x would be good enough. I really like the size, I was a bit shocked when I saw how small it was. It would be a bit of a bulge in your pocket, but it would certainly fit. It makes my S2 look giant. I miss the image stabilization of the S2. Without it, the camera is not very useful indoors without the flash. But few cameras in its class have any kind of image stabilization.
One of the reasons I went with the A540 was it had an optical view finder. My mom can hardly use my camera because she has trouble moving focusing between the fold out LCD and the subject for aiming. The viewfinder of the S2 is also an LCD, so she thought a viewfinder like a real camera would be better. Turns out the optical viewfinder isn’t much better. Part of it has to do with her bifocals, but I am not sure all of it can be blamed on that. I don’t really like the viewfinder since I am used to the LCD live preview, but I don’t have a problem using it.
You can read more on the A540 at dcresource.com and CNet.
May 29th, 2006
Firefox 2 Alpha, branded Bon Echo, was just released. As usual with Firefox releases, it was announced on a number of big websites before it was officially ready. I downloaded it a day early too, but I knew what I was getting. This is an Alpha release meaning it is for testing, not for most users. It is not near Beta quality as previous Firefox Alpha releases have been so be prepared if you try it.
I know it is an alpha, but the new stuff is a mess and the old stuff isn’t improved much if any. If Mozilla is hoping to get the final 2.0 out before or around the same time IE7 and Vista are released I fear it is going to be pretty rough and not going to stand up to IE7’s advances.
I read a comment that compared this to a version 1.6 Alpha rather than 2.0 Alpha because of the few improvements over 1.5. He was optimistic that by the final release it would be worthy of a .5 version increase. The currently planned features would do it for me, but are they going to be done in time or will features be thrown out to make the release date?
So far it appears to use less memory than FF 1.5 but I haven’t used it heavily. If it does, that is a really good thing since that was a frequent complaint about 1.5. It still uses a lot, but at least it doesn’t go wild eating up whatever free memory it can get.
I thought part of the point of moving Bookmarks and history into an SQLite database with Places was so having a lot of Bookmarks wouldn’t slow down the Bookmarks menu. It is still takes several seconds to display the menu after I click on Bookmarks just as FF 1.5. I have a lot of bookmarks, over 2000 bookmarks which is still more than 600 KB after removing embedded favicons and some other meta data.
But so far Places is very rough, it currently doesn’t even have as much functionality as the old Bookmark system they are replacing. But supposedly it only landed on this branch two weeks ago. For two weeks work it seems pretty good, but that isn’t how things work I am sure. It has surely gone through a lot of development before it landed. I have high hopes for Places though. I liked having my Bookmarks in HTML format, but that just isn’t efficient.
A simplified version of Places should open up in a sidebar by default. Users of IE7 are going to like their Favorites Center dropdown menu that can turn into a sidebar. I have seem several older users that like to have their bookmarks or history sidebar open all or most of the time in both IE and FF.
How about the biggest mistake of all? Close buttons on every tab. There are two major problems with that.
First, you can accidentally close a tab while switching to it. I could live with the close buttons on tabs if the buttons weren’t active when the tab isn’t active. Currently even though the buttons are still active when the tab is not, they are grayed as if they are not active. I know you will be able to undo closing tabs, but you shouldn’t have to. Opera 8.5 does the exact same thing and it is pretty annoying in the little I used Opera. I closed a bunch of tabs by accident while switching. Opera already has the undo function built in as the usual Edit, Undo. That is easily discoverable and something Firefox developers should think about copying. Current FF extensions that provide the undo function I think are too complex for most users. They are great for advanced users, but for most people a whole lot of undo close choices such as window or tab and which ones or all going back several actions is too much.
My other complaint about having close buttons on tabs is because each takes up valuable horizontal real estate. The more windows you have open the worse it will be. Currently the solution is to hide the close button on tabs when you reach a certain number of tabs (or maybe it is by tab width but it doesn’t appear that way). For my setup, after 7 tabs the close buttons hide on inactive tabs. I am sure it is just a bug, but currently when you close the 8th tab they don’t come back though, you have to get back down to 6 tabs. Not considering that, this is an inconsistent interface. Either the close buttons should always be on inactive tabs (which is not a good idea) or they should always be hidden. It is an inconsistent UI feature otherwise.
There is all kinds of discussion on handling tab overflow but there just is no good method. So preventing the overflow condition as long as possible is important. Clearly that is why the inconsistent UI is meant to solve, but a much better solution would be to only show the X on the active tab.
It is hard to believe, but Microsoft does pretty much exactly what I want with tab close buttons in IE7. In addition to them only being shown on the active tab, they stand out less. Firefox’s are big and bright red so along with the favicon the page title is surrounded by graphics. I wonder how many people will make their site’s favicon into FF Xs just to throw people off.
I discovered hitting “Use Current Pages” as Homepage adds all the open tabs. Clearly the button text says that but last time I did it in 1.5 I didn’t have more than one tab open. As currently displayed all on a single line, a user may think FF is adding only the first tab in the window as the homepage. I did and I even knew FF could have multiple homepages.
What is with swapping the Stop and Reload buttons? Neither are likely frequently used when compared to the back button. And if you are putting them in order of most use, I suspect the forward button is used less by common users. But that would clearly be dumb. My point is, don’t swap buttons just for the sake of moving them. Consistency in placement is also important (just look at the huge mistake IE has made with IE7’s toolbars). Every time I go to hit stop now I end up almost hitting Reload. I am currently using large icons which I don’t normally do so that proves to me that my brain looks for the stop button in Firefox as the third button from the right, not the distance and clearly not first looking at the image.
I have also read that the Home button may be on the way out (by default). Maybe that was just discussion or a planned “feature” since it is still here in 2.0 Alpha. Based on usability tests the home button may never get used, but does that really reflect actual usage? I don’t think so. I know there are a lot of people that probably never use it, but a lot of people don’t use Bookmarks/Favorites either and that isn’t being thrown out. When I am using one of my computers I use the Home button pretty frequently. I have a custom homepage with most of the links that I go to frequently. The default homepage is just a Google search page. It is not necessary to go Home to run a search since we have the search box. IE7 hasn’t gotten rid of the Home button though they did move it in their scattering around the toolbar buttons.
The Home page is where a portal site makes sense. When I setup someone’s browser for them, I usually choose Google News or Yahoo News. My Yahoo or Google’s Personalized Home are great choices even if the user doesn’t have an account. The page non logged in users get already have a good selection of information (more so on My Yahoo).
Back to the Bookmarks and History menu, why do we have two options in each that do basically the same thing. Bookmarks has “Search in Bookmarks” and “Organize Bookmarks” which both bring up Places just the same. History does exactly the same with “Search in History” and “View All History.” Not only is this pointless, it takes up space and is are just more menu options you must read through. Even if they are intended to do a slightly different thing eventually it seems a waste to include both. The idea of places is to have everything in one place. Searching and managing. No need for menu items for both.
One reason the wasted space in the Bookmarks menu bothers me is because the overflow scrolling sucks a whole lot. If you have a ton of bookmarks and don’t have them in a well organized hierarchy using the scroll up and down “buttons” is horrible. It is very slow to reach where you want, but too fast to actually see where you are going. Clearly those are contradictory needs, but that is where the problem lies with this implementation. It doesn’t meet either need because it tries to meet both at the same time.
I don’t have a good suggestion how to fix it though. Something like Microsoft’s Personalized Menus would certainly be possible now that Bookmarks and History are in the DB, but I hate that in UIs. A scroll bar would be a bit more usable, but not consistent with what users expect from dropdown menus. K-Meleon uses submenus to deal with this. At the bottom of what Bookmarks could be displayed on the screen it has a [more] “folder” that expands into another row of Bookmark items. It is an easier to use solution than what is currently in Firefox, but it is not a great one.
And a longtime annoyance is the Add Bookmark menu items scroll with the bookmarks. It is a major pain to scroll back up to the top to bookmark a site. I know Ctrl+D bookmarks the page, but I had to look that up, I don’t remember it. Why would I, they letter ‘D’ has nothing to make me think bookmark, favorite, or add. Too bad ‘B’, ‘F’, and ‘A’ already have pretty standard uses.
I have read that Bookmarks/Favorites aren’t used by many people. My observations of others show the same thing. As for myself, I bookmark a lot of stuff but I don’t often go back to them. I bookmark them mostly just in case. Of course, part of the reason I don’t use them is the UI sucks and is slow when handling lots of bookmarks. The other reason is because I built my own custom homepage with most of the links I go to regularly.
They also badly need to get Native Theme Rendering done. FF menus just look horrible on Windows other than those using the Luna theme on XP. It is listed as one of the “Nice to Have” features of 2.0. Meaning we still probably won’t see it till 3.0 if ever.
I also decided to give a Trunk build with Cairo a try (Trunk is where work on the road to Firefox 3.0 is done). Cairo is much better than I imagined. I figured it would still be pretty slow but it wasn’t bad. There are display bugs with it, but my main concern was the speed. Don’t know about slow machines, but it runs fine on my laptop which isn’t the fastest anymore. Other than Cairo there aren’t many visible differences from the Firefox 2 Alpha.
Update: Mike Beltzner, user experience lead for Mozilla, posted a bunch of info on the direction they are planning for Firefox 2. This comes from open discussion with users in their newsgroups. This is a very good sign and I like most of what is planned. But we will see how much actually makes it into Firefox 2.
March 22nd, 2006
Several months ago I decided it was finally time to buy a good digital camera. I have been wanting a good one for years but was never really happy with the ones anywhere near my price range. Previously the best I had was a 1.2 megapixel “keychain” camera. Anything would be a huge improvement, but I wanted a huge zoom and lots of megapixels. After lots of shopping and reading reviews, I finally chose the Canon Powershot S2 IS. I am really glad I did.
There wasn’t (and still isn’t) a lot of choice in the super zoom category and I knew I didn’t want to go all the way up to a D-SLR (too big and expensive plus no live LCD preview). The main part of my shopping involved testing out display models to see which ones I could actually get good pictures out of. Since no store has all brands and models, this took several days and a lot of driving. Best Buy turned out to have the best selection to look at. Circuit City would be second best. Both had cameras the other didn’t. Get a feel for them this way was also important, some that looked good online were just awkward to hold.
I had borrowed a friend’s Kodak a few times and much of the time I had blurry images. I just wasn’t keeping the camera still enough when I clicked the shutter. Being used to film cameras and higher ISOs, that was never a problem before. The last part of the name of my S2 is IS, which stands for Image Stabilization and it works really well. Except in low light, I almost never have that problem. That was the biggest selling point for me, I wanted a camera that I could actually use.
Thousands of shots later I still love this camera. There are some limitations like a max 400 ISO (which gets pretty grainy/noisy), its size, and it uses AA batteries. The AA battery limitation turns out out be a big plus for many users, me included now. You can buy your own rechargeable batteries (I bought two sets) and if you run out you can always buy some AAs almost anywhere to keep you going till you can recharge. That convenience is pretty good since there is little warning before the batteries run out. You get only a few more shots once the battery indicator comes on. But two sets of good rechargeable batteries and a charger adds a bit to the price which I didn’t really take into account originally.
I wish it was a little smaller. It has a nice size for fitting in you hand when you are shooting and it isn’t really heavy, but it stands no chance of fitting in your pocket. The lens of course takes up a good bit, you just can’t squeeze a 12x optical zoom into nothing. Having to choose between super zoom and pocket size I choose zoom and still would today. I am not sure how much I would like a tiny thin camera anyway. Hitting the buttons and just holding it would be awkward I think. But being able to put it in my pocket might make up for that.
Most reviews will complain that the lens cap comes off too easy. I agree. But it seems to be on purpose. When you turn it on with the cap on, the strap would put pressure on the lens motor which can’t be good. Of course a simple solution to that would be make the strap a tiny bit longer. It doesn’t come off just from gravity or shaking, it actually has to brush against something. I have gotten used to it and it stays on most of the time.
The other common review complaint is the plastic threads for a tripod. It holds just fine, but I guess the fear is they could be stripped easily if you use a tripod often. Mine has only been on one a few times so for me it is not a problem I worry about.
The price was a bit more than I wanted to pay, but it was worth it and it has come down since I bought it. Canon recently announced the S3 IS which I am already a big fan of. There aren’t a lot of changes, but more megapixels and double the ISO are big selling points for me. I am a little worried about the 100 gram weight increase, currently I don’t think it is heavy, but it would be nice if the new one weighed less, not more.
And to prove banner ads actually do make a difference sometimes, I clicked on a Sony camera ad and found this really nice camera. The Sony Cybershot DSC-R1 makes the S3 look pathetic, but it also costs a whole lot more. It is a bit less than a D-SLR and you don’t need to add more for a good lens since it is built in. Interchangeable lenses are of course a must for some people, but even on my Dad’s old film SLR I usually used only one lens (with amazing zoom). It was big and heavy, but I love zoom. The one downside of the Sony camera is the zoom is only 5x optical zoom compared to the 12x of the Canon S2 and S3.
I also looked at some of the competition for the Sony DSC-R1. Canon has a camera up in that price range too with a body similar to my current S2. The zoom is better than the Sony, but only 7x so still not as good as the S2/S3. I just wonder if the higher megapixels make up for that in ability to crop photos later. I like some of its features, but it is more of a pro camera than I want.
While I am looking forward to the S3, if you want to save some money on a super zoom camera, the S2 is a still a good camera and the S3 so far doesn’t seem to be a great deal better. Once the S3 is out the S2’s price should drop even more though not necessarily in stores. When I was shopping for the S2 the S1 was still pretty high priced. Try online but be careful where you buy from.
March 21st, 2006
I haven’t used WordPress much, but so far so good (mostly). The install page mentioned “the Famous 5-minute install.” I didn’t time it, but I bet it was pretty close to that. I am pretty amazed at how easy it was to setup. And the options and customizability is great, far better than blogger.
I was very surprised by the number of plugins available. I knew WP had plugins, but you can find one for just about anything. The only problem is many are not up to date with the latest release just like Firefox’s extensions. But unlike Firefox extensions, nothing blocks the install of non-working extensions except the PHP errors you will get when you try to use it.
I am finding the “rich” post editor a bit annoying. In Firefox the cursor is a bit jumpy sometimes. I am used to writing post HTML by hand so I have switched to the non-rich mode. In rich mode I keep having troubles with extra tags or not enough tags and constantly have to edit the raw HTML to fix it.
I already mentioned what I think of the default WP themes in my second post. Since there is only one decent default theme it is way overused by bloggers so it gets boring. And I wonder why the Dashboard skin is nicer than the default blog skin anyway. I like the simple blue theme of the admin pages.
And where is the spell checker? I was pretty surprised to not be able to find the spell check button when I first started using WP. I figured it must be there somewhere. How could they release it without one? My spelling isn’t that good and I would prefer not to look like an idiot who can’t spell when I post. Firefox not having a spell checker I can understand (but in 2.0 they are supposedly adding one), but this is like Thunderbird not having a spell checker. That would be insane. It probably isn’t as critical to spell correctly on your blog as it is in business emails, but still any publishing tool should have a spell checker installed by default.
As I said before, there are lots of plugins for WP so now I have Live Spell Checker. It also works on comments which is pretty nice. But it doesn’t work quite right with the rich editor. It was about the only one I found that said it worked with WP 2.0. It uses Google for spell checking so the spell check interface is very similar to Gmail. But it wrapped lines and caused the raw HTML to display in a box above the rich text editor. At least the comment checker part doesn’t even work right on the author’s webpage (with Firefox). It does work ok with non-rich mode though.
March 15th, 2006
